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Software Defined Networking & the confessions of a network engineer in the cloud.

Before I start, I have a small confession to make. In a previous
life I was paid to build and support large networks for major
global organisations. I loved my job, late nights in datacenters
racking, cabling and configuring large expensive boxes packed
full of flashing lights was heaven for me. Moving forward today
as the COO of an AWS Cloud Consultancy, much to the despair of my
team, I still love to roll up my sleeves and dive back into
networking when no one is looking.

I have to admit after spending the last 6 years working within
Cloud Consultancies, these opportunities are becoming fewer and
fewer. So when I was recently offered the chance to deploy a new
AWS Direct Connect Service for a customer who we are migrating
into the AWS Sydney region, I jumped at the chance.

I should point out that a prime driver for this client is to save
money. They wanted to move out of their datacenter as quickly as
possible, without spending $$$ on migration costs. No problem
there, right!

Running through my options for quickly getting large volumes of
data into AWS in Sydney; AWS Native Data Transfer services (e.g.
Snowball, import/export) are not supported, so Direct Connect was
my only option. What I needed was an AWS Direct Connect Service
provisioned with lots of bandwidth, but I needed to keep the cost
as low as possible.

Speaking to several Direct Connect vendors “in country”, the
conversation sort of went like, “No problem Mike, sign up for a
12-month contract, if you want more or less Mbps, just call our
service desk, log a call, we should be able to make the change in
24hrs”. At this point I’d loose interest. Having
spent many years in the instant gratification world of AWS I find
myself getting (unreasonably) frustrated when the IT services I
want to use don’t align with the commercial models of public
cloud (pay for what you use, when you need
it).

However after speaking to the Megaport team, my hopes were
raised, “..just provision a 1Gbps port for your customer, then
use our portal to scale the network speed up and down as you
need…”, Really you mean I scale from 1Gbps to 10Mbps to 100Mbps
in minutes as I want, no service desk calls, no emails, no
over-provisioning of bandwidth? Sounds too good to be true.

Moving forward several months, I can happily say the Megaport
Direct Connect service does exactly what it says on the box.
We’ve been configuring the Megaport service up and down like
crazy to match our migration schedule. Our customer only pays for
the service they are actually using! Sound
familiar? The outcome is that we can quickly
migrate our customer into the cloud, without burdening them with
large networking transfer costs. Software Defined
Networking, I love it!

Service Billing Visualisation from the
Megaport Portal

Of course it’s not all roses, you still have a small fixed per
month port charge and you still need to provision the last mile
circuit if your data center is not near a Megaport POP, which
takes time.

But more importantly showing someone how to reconfigure the
bandwidth of Megaport circuit on the fly from your phone, whilst
in the stadium watching a Cricket match, can get you in trouble
with your operations team. You have been warned.

Michael Butler is the Chief Operation Officer and
Founding Partner for Consegna.cloud